“So, fighting and organizing for racial and economic justice is in my DNA,” Ross said on many occasions. He acknowledged that he had gotten into a fair amount of trouble doing his organizing work — “good trouble, as John Lewis used to say"
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Chávez and the UFW exposed a paradox that still affects most farmworkers. No matter how hard they work, most will never achieve the so-called American Dream as they are bound to a system of agricultural production that thrives on labor exploitation.
Huerta’s approach to activism is to take it day by day, victory by victory. Building a movement is the work of a lifetime; it takes time, commitment and hope.
“When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of people we are. ..I am convinced that the truest act of courage..is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice.”
Cesar Chavez (1927-1993)
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The movement led by Cesar Chavez , Dolores Huerta and others created a union and reduced the oppression of farm workers for a time. Then the corporations and the Right Wing forces adapted their strategies of oppression. The assault on the UFW and the current reconquest of power in the fields are examples of strategic racism, that is a system of racial oppression created and enforced because it benefits the over class -- in this case corporate agriculture.
The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.
The movie, Cesar Chavez, documents his life and his role in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. An aspect of the film is the largely forgotten contributions of Filipino Americans to the farm labor movement. Since the 1920s, when Filipinos first learned to organize into unions in Hawaii, Filipinos were important leaders in organizing farmworkers to fight against unfair working conditions.
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